English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Reminder: from substance to subject 1:00 The last session was a bit... There were some rather abstract sequences. We talked about substance. Basically, it was from substance to subject, if you remember, last session. And I did recall the different meanings of substance in Aristotle. And to sum up the essential point, in Antiquity, substance is therefore the subject, since it's originally the same word. Remember, substare, that which stands underneath? And subject, subjacere, to lie underneath.
1:44 In both cases, it means that which is underneath. Underneath what? The subject is what lies underneath the attributes. Because everything we say about the subject — it's like this, it's that, it's expensive, it's cheap, it's new, it's old — all of that is affirmed, to speak like Aristotle, is affirmed of a subject. But substance is that which is affirmed of nothing. Everything is affirmed of it, but it, it — you can't say this tablet is Médie.
The Place des Vosges, the suburbs, and the passage to otherness 2:18 Médie is the subject. She is unique, irreplaceable. There is nothing more banal than being unique. Look carefully, all of that, everyone. A parenthesis, you see, compared architecturally and aesthetically, compare the Place des Vosges, for instance, to any suburban zone.
2:48 I have nothing either for or against one or the other, that's not the point. I discovered the suburbs since I've been at Cachan, for me it was a permanent revelation. It's in the suburbs that I got the reference of those girls waiting for their boyfriend at the RER, trembling because he's five minutes late. Those are things that in Paris we've forgotten. But from an architectural point of view, the Place des Vosges is impressive, people come from all over the world, you see that kind of homogeneity. Whereas you might think it's monotonous, you see.
3:18 Not all the houses are unique, they're all alike. Whereas in the suburbs, everyone wants their own house, my dream, my little house. The result is there's nothing more boring, you see, than the zone. It's an interesting paradox. I'll close the parenthesis. So, it was from substance to subject. There I gave the essential point, the philosophical takeaway from last time. Philosophico-historical, in Hegelian terms if you like. What characterizes substance and therefore the grammatical subject in Antiquity is identity.
3:53 Key formula, Plato: know thyself. "Same" [même] designates identity, it's the mark of identity. Modernity: Rimbaud, "I is an other." With the stroke of genius in this formula being the deliberate grammatical mistake. It's not "I am an other," it's "I is," to show the otherness even more strongly. I speak of myself in the third person, but as an other. So, we saw that it was precisely this divide that marked the difference between the old world and the new.
4:28 Clinging to identity, to the invariant. Or, on the contrary, accepting that identity — I'm not denying identity, but I'm saying that true identity is the one that results from a relation, and not from a substance. If you look closely, in Spinoza, who is a great philosopher, one of the greatest without doubt, if not the greatest along with Aristotle when it comes to substance, he begins by defining substance as that which is by itself. That which, says Spinoza, does not need the concept of another thing in order to be formed.
5:01 You see, you know well what that means. Whereas I, I don't know, a dog, I need mammals to produce it, I need to be alive, all sorts of things that are not specific to dogs. So it took two millennia, mind you, to move from a conception of the subject by itself, alias substance, to the subject who only is through another.
5:34 And I told you, who remembers, those were my last words, before your applause broke out. What were my last words? Ah, I've caught you out, I hadn't rewatched it myself, that's just what I thought. I had said, we'll see it next time, for here I introduce the dialectic of recognition, being through another. Of recognition, a fundamental concept in Hegel, of course, the Anerkennung. If you want to sum up recognition in Hegel, there's a simple formula, I told you, as it is written in Hyppolite's translation: a self-consciousness is in itself and for itself only when it is in itself and for itself for another self-consciousness.
Anerkennung in Hegel 6:21 So, for those who think this sounds like gibberish, fortunately there's a comma, the sentence isn't finished, and it ends with: that is to say, insofar as it is recognized. There you go, thankfully there's a translation. A self-consciousness is in itself and for itself. Because in itself, it is recognized, but if it doesn't know it — it could have nazifying tendencies, we'll get to that, we'll come to it — but it is in itself and for itself when it is in itself and for itself for, implicitly with, another self-consciousness.
6:56 I'll add personally, so it's clear for everyone, if we want to understand recognition in Hegel, that true recognition is only gratifying when I am recognized by a being supposed to be free. Because if there's a whip involved, or money — it comes down to the same thing — if I tell someone to tell me every morning that I'm the most beautiful, the best, etc., it will be gratifying, maybe for five minutes. You see? There are plenty of films on this subject, you know, where the billionaire — look at Citizen Kane, for example — spends his time wondering whether he's loved for his money or for himself, you see?
7:36 So recognition is only gratifying if the one granting it is supposed to be doing so freely. That's important. I am free when I am recognized as such by another free being. There. Those are reminders, and we'll have plenty of occasions to come back to them. So why am I bringing this up? I talked a lot, so I did fairly classical philosophy last time — substance, subject, predicate. And it's because I'm now coming back to the reconstitution of Nazism.
8:20 Obviously, one happily assumes it's mainly our era that will see Nazism reconstituted. We'll see that's not quite exact, that it's been going on for a good while. I would even say, if I'm a bit pessimistic, you'll correct me, maybe it's even a bit late to notice it. And that it's been going on for a good while. You'll see why I say that. Particularly in economic terms. But let's not say more about what we're going to see later. So, the opposite of recognition, as I've just summarized it, recalled it, for now, isn't very complicated.
Unrecognition: Primo Levi facing Pannwitz 8:55 The opposite of recognition is given to us, illustrated for us, by a striking passage from Primo Levi's memoirs. You know who Primo Levi is, don't you? He's an Italian writer, an Italian Jew, who was interned at Auschwitz and survived, because luckily he was a great chemist, useful to the camp administration. He's the guy they need to make synthetic rubber. You know how far self-sufficiency was pushed in Germany at the time — everything had to be synthetic, even synthetic jam.
9:27 My German wife used to say that they often made nettle soups. It's coming back into fashion now, with ecology. It's good, tastes a bit like watercress soup. Anyway. And they had no coffee, they always had chicory, things like that, yes. Well, there he was a chemist, so he was very useful for making, in particular, synthetic rubber, you see? It was needed for that, calcium carbide, I believe.
9:59 Don't ask for more. So, one day, he's dying of thirst in the camp, he's at Auschwitz-Birkenau, he can live, but under the conditions of a camp prisoner. And he sees an icicle on a window, he grabs the icicle to suck on it. You see? A passing guard rips the icicle from him. So he can't help saying, warum? Why? And the German answers him: there is no why. And, his gaze — for the first time he meets his superior, Panwitz is his name, if you're interested, P-A-N-W-I-T-Z, his hierarchical superior, his department head, so to speak, in the camp.
10:42 It's immense, it's Auschwitz, kilometers of it. "His gaze was not that of one man to another man." You see the connection with recognition? It's exactly the opposite. "His gaze was not that of one man to another man. And if I could fully explain the nature of that exchanged gaze, as through the glass of an aquarium, between two beings belonging to two different worlds — if I manage to explain that gaze, I would have thereby explained the essence of the madness of the Third Reich."
11:13 You see? How I go from recognition [reconnaissance] to "de-recognition" [déconnaissance]. It's a pun, for what it's worth, excuse me. It's a barbarism, it doesn't exist. But you see, it means refusing to know, to acknowledge. It's a denial of recognition. I'm not dealing with a man, I'm dealing with an Untermensch — a subhuman, you know, an Untermensch. From the moment there's a superman, I get subhumans. I'm going to upset the Nietzsche fans again who send me objections in their YouTube mail.
11:52 I'm sorry, I get the impression I upset them every time I take a jab at Nietzsche, even though I often say I have affection for that poor devil and that great fool. What I hold against people is turning him into a great demystifier, a great unmasker, when he's actually a petty German bourgeois terrified by the rise of the working class in his time. You know he volunteered to go crush the Communards. Then, when they saw him at the army with his poor eyesight, it's mechanical.
12:23 Stretcher-bearer at best. Yes, but I... What Primo Levi describes, that kind of gaze that has nothing to do with a man. I am not recognized as a human being. I'm not even talking about recognition of what I do individually, but not even from the point of view of the species. All of this is very current.
12:54 It's not far from anti-speciesism. Now it's almost normative not to be recognized as human — regarding animals, you hear it often. I'm digressing a bit. Why bring this up here? I'm talking about Nietzsche because the concept of the superman, the representation of the superman, is important to him after all. Now, I told you, when you posit a superman, automatically those who aren't part of it become subhumans.
Losurdo, Nietzsche, and Lothrop Stoddard 13:27 Now, if you've read a little of the admirable works of Domenico Losurdo, my late comrade, no doubt, you know he wrote the greatest summa on Nietzsche ever written. Don't say, at least in the French language, because he wrote in Italian. You know, the translation published by Delga, it's a book that must weigh about 3 kilos, roughly — I'm barely exaggerating. My attention had been drawn to this book before it was translated into French.
13:59 I had spoken with Tertulian, you see, who's Tertulian, perhaps? You know, he's the great French specialist on Lukács. And I had gone to hear him at one of his lectures at the EHESS, and afterward, quietly, I said to him, sotto voce — I said to him, really, why does everyone try to whitewash Nietzsche by saying that everything fascistic in him... fascistic, you see, I'm a bit more nuanced than it seems — comes from his sister, who supposedly falsified his writings.
14:30 You've read that a hundred times. He's fine, but his sister, she was a bitch, basically, excuse my language. She's thoroughly nazi, that's for sure. And Tertulian tells me: he's more nazi than she is. Losurdo was writing a thesis on that, that's the book I'm telling you about. You see? So why am I bringing this up? Because Losurdo put us onto a man I absolutely must tell you about, Lothrop Stoddard.
15:03 Do you know Lothrop Stoddard? Do you know Lothrop Stoddard? Nobody knows him. There, I've made my impact. Lothrop — let me call him Lothrop — that's a first name, L-O-T-H-R-O-P, can you imagine, Lothrop. Yes, so he's an American from the late 19th century, roughly. But racist like only someone from the Midwest could be at the time, you see what I mean. You know, "the only good Indian is a dead Indian," that whole atmosphere. He's a theorist, this guy — a theorist who classified all of humanity into different races.
15:38 Of course, hierarchized, with at the very top the Nordics, the Scandinavians. Right? At the very bottom, me. Well, it starts with Corsicans, the wogs, then Africa, let's not even talk about it. The Orient, the subhumans. In between, I'll note for the anecdote, the Swiss — what do we do with the Swiss, sort of in between? They're called the Alpines. Yet another race, you see? Well, no, it caused millions of deaths, if people are laughing, they'll want to throw up. What's interesting is that the notion of the Underman, coined for the first time — the term first appears under the pen of Lothrop Stoddard, S-T-O-D-D-A-R-D.
16:21 Well before the Nazis spoke of Untermensch — it was imported from America, sorry, from the United States. America is a magnificent continent. It was Rosenberg who praised the merits of Lothrop Stoddard's writings, had them translated into German, and that gave rise to the notion of Untermensch. So you see, the Underman preceded the Untermensch.
16:51 So, we'll end on a gay note — well, funny, gay isn't the word, but funny — the fact that in his hierarchy, in the United States, the greatest dangers were never the Jews. Jews were never seen as a danger in the era of the Western, in the Midwest, it wasn't the Jews cluttering up the scenery. It's interesting, that's where you see how relative it all really is. On the other hand, first in line, the Indians. I repeat: a good Indian is a dead Indian. Blacks, all that, they're subhumans, not humans.
17:24 It starts a bit on the Pacific coast, the Yellows. What's that about? And he adds — and this is where it gets funny — of course, he says, the white socialists who support them — he's so stupid that he ends up saying it's not really about color, it's just a matter of how dumb someone is. You see? And above all, the white socialists who support them — inferior race, subhumans. Right? So, a bunch of subhumans, there you go.
17:55 To tell you everything there is to say about "his gaze was not that of one man to another man." It sounds like abstract generalities. It's not. I know that gaze well. You find it among the SS of that era, but also among certain NASA engineers. I have the feeling that as I get older, I'm becoming Columbo, always quoting my wife.
18:26 Not dogmatism, no, but it's firsthand information she gives me. She knows jazz well. She actually knew it better than me when I met her. And she knew Chet Baker quite well. I could sign autographs on her behalf if you're interested — my ex-wife knew Chet Baker well. And so she knows America well through jazz, and of course she's German. And it's she who revealed to me — and here I'm quite serious — to what extent the white American population, so-called WASP, White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant.
19:00 Right? You always have to add Protestant, because it's not enough to be white. Look at Kennedy, he didn't last long. He was Catholic, he was Irish. For once they had a Catholic — bam! He was a crook too, I'm not saying that as a value judgment, I mean White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. That is to say Puritan, that is to say ecological, that is to say... Well, I'll stop there. Lots of things come up when you pull on that thread. Now, she pointed this out to me because she...
19:35 Her first husband, I think... I'm sorry. No, it's not even my own life story, by the way. It's my wife's life before me. Her first husband was an excellent jazz pianist and he got a gig, as they say. That is to say... Ah yes, you know, you understand. When they say you're going to play... You found a little contract in a bar, etc. That's a gig. Excellent — he was a bass guitarist, by the way. Thanks, thanks. I know the chord charts well, right.
20:08 So he was playing at a base which was the largest American base on the entire African continent, along with the one at Kenitra in Morocco, for those who know it — the Wheelus base. Personally, one can't really picture this base. There were 3,500 American aircraft, fighter jets. Where was that? In their neck of the woods — in Libya. The world of small things. And yes, it was the era of King Idris. There was no Gaddafi yet, you could do whatever you wanted. King Idris — you just gave him the royalties, so to speak.
20:40 He was known in Cannes because he forgot himself a bit in the sheets. I'm not one for gossip, but apparently King Farouk did the same, but in Egypt, before Nasser. You may have heard of a novel from the Beat Generation in the United States — it's not Malcolm Lowry, no, the other one, the typewriters guy. Yes, William Burroughs, thank you.
21:11 Some of you have heard of William Burroughs, Bill Burroughs, you know, who was hooked to the bone on heroin, a very good writer. And I asked him one day — because he was at the same base too — what Libya was like at the time of King Idris. He told me: "flies," flies. Well, she tells me, the gaze of the military police, MPs, who picked up drunk Americans from the bars, etc., is exactly that gaze — because she lived through the war, she's ten years older than me, she knew it well, her father was an officer in the Luftwaffe — so, I mean, the white American population is essentially Germanic. That doesn't mean they're all crooks, there are very good people in there — Stan Getz, for instance — oh wait, he's Jewish, I should have picked someone more Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Same with Bill Evans, he's Jewish too. Curious, the greatest white jazz musicians —
Libres d'obéir by Johann Chapoutot 22:21 jazz, it's always odd, it comes from the margins — the greatest of all, but ranked by the French Americans, is Django Reinhardt, a Roma, a gypsy, you see — there, I love the digression — that's the subhumans, to continue. So you see, Chapoutot — I found this anecdote — his book just came out, if you haven't got it yet, it's called Libre d'obéir [Free to Obey], it's getting interesting, the management of Nazism today, sorry, from Nazism to today, isn't it?
23:02 Yes, there's a link, from Nazism to today. So why am I bringing this up? First, if you don't want to buy the book — let me pick up my thread again — there's an excellent video where he's interviewed, where he sums it up in 40 minutes, it's on YouTube, Johann Chapoutot, Libre d'obéir, on the show La Grande Table, there, you have the reference on France Culture — France Culture, you have the audio version if you go to the France Culture website, and if you go to YouTube, you have the video version.
23:39 So why am I bringing this up now? This is where it gets... You understand why I was a bit worried earlier when I said it's not too late to talk about it, to warn you against the reconstitution of Nazism, you see? Because it's a moment that has already begun. You know the official theory, the general theory, as they say, whether in physics or in economics, right? A general theory in physics too, the Big Bang, that.
24:11 No, seriously, the general theory in ideology, if you will, is that there are two horrors — Nazism and Communism — and everything else is basically decent people, well, proper. It's convenient, that kind of thing: if I'm neither a Nazi nor a Communist, I'm one of the decent people. Frankly. And you know this comes from the disciple of the most Nazi of philosophers — I'm the one specifying "the most Nazi of philosophers," because there's a guy who wonders whether he wasn't a bit of a Nazi, so I say he's the most Nazi of the great ones — there are minor Nazis who have a philosophy of the Third Reich, I'm not even talking about them.
24:48 If you want to know them, you can read on a very well-documented site, the site called Les Amis de Georg Lukács, precisely, on a video where there are long quotations from intellectuals who were installed in the Third Reich in the philosophy departments of the universities, the famous Baeumler, people like that, Krieck, and you always find the same thing, I won't dwell on it, I've already talked about it, I'll talk about it other times, anti-Cartesian, anti-Platonist, anti-Hegelian, but that's a Deleuzian program too, well yes, I'm going to get attacked again, I never said Deleuze was a Nazi, I only said it's troubling.
25:32 That's a Foucauldian program too, but listen, anti-Cartesian, anti-progress, anti-Plato, anti-Christian, I forgot, you can be an atheist without being a partisan of Dionysus, as you find, yes, so why this book in particular, what's specific about it? Now I'll dwell on it: it studies a rarely treated field. When we talk about the Third Reich, it's management. So, you know the general theory, a totalitarian, centralized state, you've seen, like me, we all have the same images in our heads, don't we, the swastika made with 10,000 torches there in Nuremberg, on the square, everything impeccably ordered, Pipo—no, he says the revelation, he's the greatest expert, Chapoutot, you know, of the archives, I don't agree with everything he says, from an ideological point of view he's wobbly sometimes, for him it's healed by an Asian thing, you see, that's not his field, I don't know, I'm interested in him for what he teaches me as a historian, quotations, newspaper articles from the period, discoveries.
26:42 So, what do we learn? Well, listen, I'll quote you a sentence from Chapoutot, from Johann Chapoutot: the Nazi managers reproached the French, at the time, for being too centralizing and too authoritarian—good grief, we're among anarchists here, do you think I'm exaggerating? I'm far from it. That's why they oppose French-style administration, you know, the strikers, all of that is the civil service, that's civil servants, that's parasites—you're very kind to have come listen to me tonight, because they were stuck in traffic, likewise, it's Hugo who told me he got a knee problem from walking so much because of the strikers, right Hugo?
27:32 Watch out for victimhood narratives. German-style management, which, quite counterintuitively for us—that's his phrase, that's the least one can say—is liberal. Nazi management has a hyper-liberal discourse, we'll get there, look, the Nazi idea is that the state must be pulverized. That's not possible, that's not what I was taught about Nazism, I've read Hannah Arendt after all—yes, well may we laugh, listen, Hannah Arendt, that's the general note. If you look closely, the European Parliament—I started this whole cycle with this—it's that scandal that made me decide to talk about the reconstitution of Nazism and the logic of the subject, it's that there are certain little baby-Nazis who say Nazism equals communism, which suits me fine, because that whitewashes Hitler, who's no longer alone in his cell, with Stalin alongside him—nice, isn't it? Now it's the European Parliament, it's institutionalized, and soon—
28:43 there are certain Marxist, communist symbols that are going to be banned in liberal Europe. So he takes several examples in Reinhard Höhn. Can we play it? Ah, wonderful, so I'd need to be set at 2 minutes 54 seconds.
Screening: Verwaltung versus Menschenführung 29:22 I worked, despite my hernia. Yes, I seem to be making rhymes at 60, I really hurt. Well, since I missed you, I didn't hesitate to come. As Johann Chapoutot rather puts it, there is a Nazi matrix, but not that there's a Nazi origin to management either. Management, as a reflection on the optimal organization of a production structure, obviously predates Nazism. Moreover, what management theorists say is that its origin is French, it's a French engineer, a mining engineer, named Henri Fayol, who came up with it.
29:56 But then, precisely, Fayol is criticized by the Nazis, not just because Fayol is French and nothing coming from France is any good, but because, besides that, this French engineer is too Cartesian, too mathematical, too hierarchical and too vertical. And that's indeed what the Nazi managers reproach the French for, being too centralizing and too authoritarian. We're at cross purposes here in the Franco-German relationship. And that's moreover why they oppose French-style administration, the Verwaltung, which is precisely centralizing, vertical and hierarchical, to the Menschenführung, that is, the leadership of...
30:35 Verwaltung, the German term roughly meaning French-style administration. Verwaltung. I was much younger, you know, when I used to travel in West Germany, either to go to East Germany on vacation, or to visit my in-laws, closer to the Rhine. I would take German trains. You know, it's a bit like in France, there's a map of Germany at the front of the carriage, you see, there was that. In the old days, you knew trains with a map of France like that, where you'd learn things when... And so, on those maps, just like on the equivalent of Michelin maps, the road maps the average German has in their car, you all know, drivers.
31:13 In the region that now corresponds to Bohemia in Czechoslovakia, the western part—I don't know, it's no longer Czechoslovakia, it's Czechia—it didn't say Czechoslovakia, it said Unter tschechischer Verwaltung, under Czech administration. I'm talking about the 1980s, all right? In Silesia, the whole western part of Poland, Schlesien, the part that was given by the Soviets at the end of the war to the Poles to compensate for the Soviets taking their own eastern part.
31:49 But that's the richest region of Poland, where the coal is. It said Unter polnisch Verwaltung, under Polish administration. Well, I don't want to multiply examples, but the furthest one was Kaliningrad. How do you say that in German? Yes? Who said it? Hey, some of you know it, bravo, Königsberg, that is, the city of...?
32:20 Kant. Kant lived and taught almost his whole life in Königsberg. That's where he took his little walk, you see? Königsberg, which Nietzsche affectionately called the great Chinaman of Königsberg. Königsberg, Unter sowjetisch Verwaltung, under Soviet administration, because it was the capital of Lithuania, of the Soviet Baltic states. There you go. Let's take a break, thank you.
32:50 That's to show you that when you say Verwaltung, it's serious. Yes. It's a word invented by the Nazis to talk about management because they don't want to use an English or American term. The Nazis are always concerned with Germanizing terms. So they oppose French-style administration to Menschenführung, to German-style management which, on the contrary, quite counterintuitively for us, is liberal. Liberal. Menschenführung, translation of management. Literally, Führer, the one who leads, the guide, to lead—that's where it comes from, ducere in Latin.
33:24 Conductor of men, the leading of men, the leadership of people, human resources management. You see, the source from which all this comes. Go on, go on. Menschenführung. Let's go, that's good. We'll obviously come back to this, it's one of the great lessons of your book. There are others. Thank you, Johann Chapoutot. It's both this liberal approach to the leadership of men and a certain hostility to the state, the state as an organizing principle, opposed by living space, the Lebensraum, etc.
Clouscard and recognition by the Communist Party 33:58 Thank you. Second chapter, the relation to the state. At the first session of this cycle, I recommended taking a quick look at a chapter of Lacan's Écrits. When we talk about the subject, it's hard not to mention it, an excerpt from the Écrits, an extract from the famous Rome Discourse of 1956—I say this for those who want to note the reference, which wasn't there—a subchapter of the chapter of the Rome Discourse called 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language.'
34:37 And Philippe Moreau had the very good idea of telling me, 'You're sending him a text that's quite difficult, this one by Lacan'—he was right, so we made a video at his place, where he has equipment, a background, a screen, etc. Although there, against a black background—well, not black today—I had the chance to comment on Clouscard's response to Mordillat, for those of you who might have taken a look at it, right?
35:09 Especially a listen, actually. Now, in his response to Mordillat—I don't know why I never remember whether it's Mordia or Mordia, you'd have to ask Lacan about that—Mordillat was a communist journalist at the time, who worked in the orbit of the IRM, the Institut de recherche marxiste, which no longer exists, and who, two years after the publication of Le Capitalisme de la séduction, which was the first recognition of Clouscard by the Communist Party apparatus—this is historically important, all of what I'm saying here.
36:03 Since in the same video I explain that Clouscard suffered enormously, until his death, from the lack of recognition—not that he was a misunderstood loner, no, he had excellent friends, etc., he was very funny and a bon vivant—but the recognition he was waiting for, like all of us, we don't wait for recognition from just anyone at random, I spoke about recognition earlier. Someone in love only waits for recognition from one person, you see, 'one being is missing and everything is depopulated.'
36:33 He was waiting for recognition from his comrades, from the democratic organizations, as they said in PCF language. And the first time it came was when Le Capitalisme de la séduction was published, in its first edition, before Delga deserved credit for reissuing it at Éditions sociales, which was called Messidor at the time, right?
37:04 With a cover chosen by yours truly at Clouscard's request. There were three slides to choose from. While we were discussing with the lady in charge of sorting the slides and proposing them to Clouscard, he told me, 'You choose.' There's a pause, and Clouscard says to the publisher, whom I salute, Richard Lagache, who was the number two at Éditions sociales alongside Lucien Sève, of course, the philosopher who directed Éditions sociales but for whom most of the technical tasks fell to Richard Lagache.
37:52 Clouscard addresses Richard and says to him, 'Why are you publishing me now? I've been saying the same thing for years, I write the same thing. Why are you publishing me now? I'll give you a scoop.' Answer—we were in '78, that is, at the time of the great clash, the break of the Common Program. This is an important reminder given the times we're living through.
38:22 The publisher's answer: 'Below 15%, we publish you.' That's a scoop. Sorry, I'm making an ellipsis but let me explain a bit. This was the time when there was immense hope. All the polls showed that the parties who had signed the Common Program had a majority in the polls. So, the last... Yours truly, I was in what's called rural cells.
38:53 I was cut out for that about as much as for weightlifting, more or less. But it was very formative, I don't regret it, in the Drôme. And I sold the Common Program at the markets of Montélimar. Yes, there was enormous expectation. Even small business owners were beginning to understand that if they were closing shop, it wasn't because of their workers' wages but because of the big companies wiping them out. Farmers who often saw posters showing a kind of black bird of prey, posters made by the right and the far right, a poster with the hammer and sickle on the bird of prey.
The break in the Common Program 39:34 The caption read, 'The communists are going to take your land.' As you know, a peasant farm closes down roughly every quarter of an hour, without the communists being in power. People were starting to understand all that. There was—and the last meeting was supposed to finalize the last details of how we were going to move from capitalism to socialism through the ballot box—the last meeting. Do you know the document? Maybe some of you have seen it.
40:05 The clash, literally speaking, right? Yes, go on, you sum it up. No, no, go on, I'll tell it. Marchais, Mitterrand, one's missing. Well, you know, and then, for the union of the left to have a majority, watch out for the small parties. Watch out for the 2 or 3 percent that represent that, but that's exactly what's needed to have a majority, you see.
40:36 It was Fabre, that was his name, the secretary general of the Radical Party, who stands up and creates the clash, literally, in front of the cameras, live, there, you see, in front of all of France. 'I'm tired of marching to the whip, the communists have unacceptable demands'—you know what the PCF's unacceptable demands were? It was the nationalizations that had been agreed upon, of course, along with the subsidiaries. And suddenly, no, it's out of the question, no, subsidiaries, no, we nationalize the parent companies but not the subsidiaries. That's where the swindle happened. Madam, Mitterrand, the greatest politician of the postwar era, not a great statesman—that's de Gaulle—but the greatest political operator, Mitterrand, coming from Vichy and saying, 'I, a man of the left'—you see, that's refusing pardon to a communist who defended the FLN during the Algerian war and who was beheaded on Mitterrand's orders, then Minister of Justice—that's not, and yet being known in history as the one who abolished the death penalty.
41:29 Hats off, hats off, hats off. So, no, but Mitterrand didn't cause the clash himself. Very clever, because the one the public opinion is going to blame for torpedoing the union of the left is the loser here. No question of the PS owning it, so they use a small party. Go on, go on, you. So, as the communists said at the time, 'We're not going to nationalize empty shells anyway.'
42:05 Tristan, who is certainly an excellent economist, knows very well what outsourcing means. Companies hadn't waited until today to outsource most of their production, and so, nationalizing only the parent company meant nationalizing empty shells. I'm making these reminders of these reminders to come back to that little scene in the offices of Éditions sociales where Clouscard says, 'Why are you publishing me now?'
42:40 That's it, now it's accepted, from the moment public opinion judged that it was the communists who were responsible—just as now everything is done in the media so that it's the strikers who are held responsible for the blockages, and all that, isn't it? It's not Macron, of course. And so, the Communist Party began a decline it never recovered from. It quickly went from 23% to already 15%. 'Below 15%, we publish you, Michel.' 'We've got nothing left to lose,' that means. Yes, there's the answer.
State and state apparatus; Reinhard Höhn 43:12 That means it was nice of him to say it meant—before, I would have tried, but maybe I would have been refused, I see. A thought like that from Clouscard, at a time when he was kissing social democracy on the mouth, was ill-timed. In this thought, what was most subversive? And there I come back to Chapoutot, it's the distinction between the state and the state apparatus. Here I come back to philosophy, to Hegel, if you will. State, state apparatus. That's among the greatest secrets of our era.
43:42 I'm being a bit solemn, I'm doing it on purpose, but I'm sure I'm falling short of reality. It's even more important than I seem to be indicating. Broadly, to say the essential, here's what's at stake in this distinction. That's what's important. We currently live in the most monstrous state apparatus ever seen in history. That's normal, the technologies, surveillance cameras, gadgets, wiretaps, you know that better than me.
44:12 You know that the internet originally comes from the Pentagon, you know all that well. The most monstrous state apparatus ever seen—the Third Reich is small potatoes at the level of controls compared to today's means technologically, isn't it? In the service of what? Of that absence of state that we call the private sector. And even of that hostility to the state that we call the private sector. And there I come back to Montreux-Émerich.
44:42 Let's go. You'll see. I'm falling short of reality. We'll come back to that obviously. But still one more word about this Reinhard Höhn who arrives fairly quickly in your book and who—I know, that's the guiding thread—you describe him as a sort of Joseph Mengele of law, which places him—Joseph Mengele was the Nazi executioner-doctor of the Auschwitz camp—which places him nonetheless in a rather uncomfortable lineage. What makes the comparison between the two established so quickly is that they're both young men in their thirties, very hard-working, very ambitious, with academic ambitions.
45:22 Joseph Mengele tortures twins to obtain a habilitation for a professorship in medicine. Reinhard Höhn quickly becomes, thanks to the SS, a professor of law at the University of Berlin. These are people from the cultivated middle bourgeoisie, on the right, traumatized by the defeat of 1918, who want to invest not only in their careers—they work for themselves, of course—but also in the national recovery of Germany. They have all the social and cultural codes, they're well-mannered, they're at ease in social settings, in networking, and they are absolutely relentless people in their ambition, for themselves as much as for Germany.
46:04 Reinhard Höhn ends up nonetheless at the rank of SS general, Oberführer, which is one of the highest ranks in the hierarchy, and he's someone who is extremely active in two areas: in thinking through the new racial order of the European continent—he's someone who co-founded a journal called Reich, Völkerordnung, Lebensraum with other young men of his generation and competence, also jurists—and moreover he's someone who thinks through the destruction or disappearance of the state, which should be replaced by agencies.
46:37 This Höhn we're talking about, SS general, is going to found the first major business school, the HEC if you will, in West Germany, which will serve as a model for almost all European business schools and where the ideas would be forged that erupted starting in the 1970s and that you know well now, New Business Management. We'll get to it, I won't get ahead of myself. Go on. Well, Mengele, at one point, founds new towns and hides. He, on the other hand, doesn't hide but gets away with it.
47:08 Yes, so you have to understand that Mengele has blood on his hands, and how much so, whereas Reinhard Höhn, no—because he's someone who escaped the SS Berlin management practice which required desk criminals to be sent to the field to assassinate people from time to time so as to get a feel for reality. So that happened to almost all of Höhn's colleagues, but not to him, who managed to stay at the head of his State Research Institute at the University of Berlin and never went to the Eastern Front. So he assassinated no one with his own hands, and there was no necessity for him to flee.
47:43 So he's going to hide for a few years, he's going to change his identity slightly while keeping his family, and then very quickly he's going to benefit from the amnesty laws starting in 1949 and from that great laundering, that great whitewashing of former Nazis, of former brownshirts who were going to be... Stop, stop. He doesn't rebuild his fortunes in Latin America, mind you, this is a laundering that happens in Europe. In that Europe for which you get scolded, dirty Bolshevik that you are, for not being pro-European enough. It's that Europe we're talking about.
Whitewashing of the Alte Kameraden and the German "miracle" 48:16 The whole leadership cadre, the Alt Kameraden, as they said, the old comrades, those who had done their dirty work on the Eastern Front, are going to oversee the whole launch of what you know under the phrase 'the famous German miracle.' But I never call it a miracle. I'll add my own small contribution, from a strictly economic point of view, but you already see the importance, at that time, of restarting industry after the destruction of the war, especially in Germany in particular, much more than in France.
48:50 After the bombings, I suppose it's a labor issue, the labor shortage is the bottleneck. Let me open a parenthesis within the parenthesis, but when I was in East Germany, you'd see almost every 300 meters 'Wir stellen ein'—'we are urgently hiring.' Any job at all, from someone to mop floors to a nuclear research engineer, that's how much labor was lacking, among those who had left for the West before the wall was built, when the American services gave five East marks for one West mark.
49:27 In short, there were surgeons who left patients on the operating table to cross over to the West. And maybe I would have done the same. Picture yourselves at Christmas, you have your children, everything is destroyed, you're in poverty, and across the way you see a beautiful house, the Marshall Plan, temptations. And so those who crossed to the West, the destruction of the war—you know, at one point there were only old people and very young people left among German civilians.
50:00 So, there was a great need for labor. And now, on the other side, in West Germany, or so-called West Germany, arrive the refugees from the Sudetenland, from Czechoslovakia, from Poland, right, millions and millions of them, but qualified people. It's not the Malian guy who's going to wash dishes at the Chinese restaurant. I say that because now I glance into the kitchens, into Asian restaurants, I go there often. Almost, when it's not African, it's Pakistanis.
50:30 No, no, it's a dream, a dream for an employer. All the qualifications, and no demands, no requirements. You see, there's no miracle. If you don't produce a miracle in those conditions, something's wrong. Now, Germany is known for monetary orthodoxy, you know that. Spending kept tight, but no, actually, it's because the greatest inflation of all time took place in Germany. That's the era when it took 2.5 million marks to buy a theater seat, a theater ticket. Which meant people gave a brick of lignite, of coal, of bad coal instead.
51:03 It was more practical than having wads of banknotes. And by the way, you'll see, it won't be long, Chapoutot — I should specify — this Germany, I go back to the images, you know, Leni Riefenstahl, the great filmmaker of the Third Reich, who made a splendid film on the 1936 Olympic Games, who was the filmmaker of the Reich, a very good technician and artist. When you look at all these stagings, the neoclassical, falsely Greek constructions, you get the impression that it's order, the center, you see.
51:37 And hats off to everyone, that was the Bidz — I'm not for anarchy. Let's go. Adapted, acculturated to the new democratic, liberal, parliamentary republic, the Federal Republic. Yes, there were a certain number of cases, exemplary of this passage of Nazi dignitaries into the administration of the Federal Republic of Germany, and also into the private sector, since that's what's at stake here too with the question of management — former Nazi dignitaries were highly prized in private companies.
52:16 Yes, yes, because on the one hand, people like Reinhard Höhn were people who had been very well trained, they generally had a doctorate, a very good university education, and on the other hand, for twelve years, private industry, the private economy, experienced a veritable orgy of orders thanks to them, since the SS was also an economic empire, a concentration-camp empire that rented out, at unbeatable rates, a nearly free labor force to German industry. So these people, in private industry, hadn't forgotten the services rendered.
52:48 And so we realize that after 1945, the SS networks, and especially the networks of the SD, that is, the SS intelligence service to which Reinhard belonged, these networks were in place everywhere — in the upper administration, in the private sector, in diplomacy, at the university, in hospitals, in the police. And these networks made it possible to recycle, to place the so-called "alte Kameraden," the old comrades, in private industry. That's exactly what happened to Reinhard, who was first employed by an employers' think tank in the late 1940s and who very quickly found himself mandated to create a business school.
53:20 A business school that's something like the equivalent of INSEAD in France, a school for executives, for people who have already entered working life, or like Harvard Business School. And when I draw the comparison with these two prestigious schools, one French and one American, it's because it was a very prestigious school, and Reinhard Höhn was going to train a number of leaders of major German companies. Yes, and the comparison is all the more valid because Harvard Business School is the model, since in the case of France as in the case of Germany, there's a kind of economic and ideological aggiornamento.
53:51 We opt for... We're in the free world, we opt for Atlanticist, liberal, productivist capitalism. And so we have to do like the Americans. So, at the same time, it's the Bad Harzburg school which is... No, I can't keep up with the number of masks falling. But France Culture, it's turning around, it's not possible. France Culture, it's not possible. I've been listening to the promotion of this liberal, democratic world for thirty years, right, and now we see its origin. It's really extraordinary.
Feudal order and pacification: from Roland to Racine 54:23 You can hardly believe your ears. Go on, go on. Thomas. It was created by SS general Reinhard Höhn in 1956. And in France, it's INSEAD, created in 1957 by government decision, since we had to adapt to new times, to a changing world, and "transform the country," as they say. So let's go a bit further, if you don't mind, into Johann Chapoutot's book, Free to Obey: The Management of Nazism to the Present Day, published by Gallimard in the NRF collection, and let's look at this question of freedom.
54:54 It's true that associating the term freedom with the term Nazism is not something one should be quick to dismiss. So, last time already, I reminded you, I brought up the feudal order. I thank Mitty for giving an excellent illustration of the laboratores in the Middle Ages, right? There's feudalism, which protects the fief, protects bodies, material goods, right?
55:27 The warrior, in other words. And so, in case of danger, you take refuge in the town, in the fortress. There's also the clergy, who protect society too, but who protect souls, not bodies, against the devil, against you and me, against the devil. And that keeps them quite busy too, they don't have time to work, and so the peasant — thank goodness he's there to feed the other two.
55:58 Working — that's the feudal order. No, but I say that, you see, it's not an easy criticism, on the contrary, that was a justification at a certain time. It's not — in the early Middle Ages, I'd say, the lord is not a parasite, he has his reason for being; he will become a parasite once the kingdom starts to be pacified. I don't want to repeat here a demonstration I once gave — "demonstration" is a rather ambitious word, but I'll illustrate, I'll show, a demonstration, that, for example, the shift from the Song of Roland to Tristan and Iseult, that is, from the epic gesture, where the hero is the warrior — there isn't much of a love story in there.
56:43 In the whole Song of Roland, there is indeed the fair Aude who waits for Roland like that, she makes appearances, we don't know much about her state of mind, whereas in Lancelot of the Lake it's exactly the opposite — everything is done for the lady, I mean. We even go to the Orient to fight the Crusades because the shortest way to reach the one I love is to go to Jerusalem and come back alive to deserve to perform great deeds.
57:14 So why do I bring this up? Because — what happened? How did we go from a literary work where the central figure, the hero, is the warrior who wields the sword, to a literary work — romance, poetry, verse romance, I say, because it's written in the Romance language — where the hero is the suitor, or the lover?
57:45 "Thus they spent the night, body against body and naked against naked," in Chrétien de Troyes, the author of Perceval the Welshman and so many others. And how did we get there? Precisely because of the pacification of the kingdom. When all the tension is taken up by external danger, it's the warrior who is at the center of everything. I had shown that in the 17th century, we find the same divide between the era of Louis XIII, when the hero is the musketeer, it's Corneille, it's Le Cid, the one who defends Spain against the bastard Arabs, already.
58:26 The kingdom, against the Moors — "We set out five hundred, but by prompt reinforcement we found ourselves three thousand upon arriving at the port." So he defends honor, his honor, we're not in love here, his honor, whether in the micro-society, the family, because his father was slapped, he must avenge him, so he kills the father of the woman he loves — so love is sacrificed to honor. Exactly the opposite, right?
58:56 And then we move to Racine, the next generation — "I'd sell off my kingdom, anything, for the first skirt that comes along," I said. Not exactly noble. But there you go: "Do you seek me out, madam? Could such a charming hope be permitted me?" That's Pyrrhus speaking to his captive, to Andromache, Hector's widow no less, who is his prisoner. He falls in love — I told you, he's possessed by the woman he possesses. Fantastic, you have to see it. What happened? In the meantime, we went from Louis XIII, an unstable power, revolts of the nobles, the League, the Fronde, the king evacuated on the sly — Louis XIV, who nearly got lynched by the people of Paris.
59:36 And then, all of a sudden, on the contrary, Louis XIV, the longest reign in French history — stability. The game is settled, war is no longer the order of the day. Right? You have to stay home, at Versailles. "I enlarged the château to keep an eye on you." I give you Molière, Lully, the two together. Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, text by Molière, music by Lully, fantastic. You have to wait for Prokofiev and Eisenstein to find collaborations like that again. There you go, Racine, what more could you want, we're doing just fine here.
Superstructures according to Marx; Proust more Marxist than Foucault 1:00:09 And what do you do when you're no longer at war? You make love. We go from Corneille to Racine. I'm doing this on purpose, being Marxist, concretely. If we only talk about productive forces and relations of production without talking about superstructures, we don't understand Marx. Because the superstructure, I quote Marx, is the forms in which men become conscious of this conflict between productive forces and relations of production and fight it out.
1:00:39 If there's no such awareness in ideological, sentimental, religious form — yes, because at the moment when Racine internalizes these issues, it's no longer war, it's love, at that very same moment, there's Pascal succeeding Descartes. The religious problematic, no longer the scientific one, is at the center. And it's the problem of salvation, not that of making man master and possessor of nature. You see, there's an extraordinary logic to all this. But there you go, I started from the Middle Ages, how we went from the warrior to the courtier, to courtly love, love as it could be practiced at court.
1:01:14 And these are fundamental reminders. Still worth recalling, there's the back of the cave, the shadows projected there, the world of feelings that exist — the back of the cave, we see it. One shouldn't think that superstructures mean it's all arbitrary. No. They express a reality, but without knowing it. That's why I've often said of an author, a good novelist — someone told me they noticed I had recently posted a Proust text, it was an anniversary, right?
1:01:55 I just posted this text of Proust's that I often quote, where the narrator sees the young girls on the boardwalk, and he says there's a redhead, a tall one, a small one, a brunette — physically they're disparate, and yet there's something common that runs through them. He says: perhaps the social class to which they belonged, and the habit of sports which was starting to spread in that privileged milieu, produces in quantity beautiful hips and good... It's an extraordinary passage. Proust, more Marxist than Foucault.
Pulverizing the state: the liberal approach to Nazi labor 1:02:26 There you go. That's why I insist — everything is hidden. Now, coming back to my Third Reich, what's at the center, the value that's central, is not the State. On the contrary, it's vilified. Hitler makes violent attacks against the State. He says the State must be pulverized. I grant this discourse its due. "The State must be pulverized." That corresponds well to Germany. Germany is teeming with all sorts of little... You go from Bavaria, right, to Saxony-Anhalt, to Saxe-Coburg.
1:03:02 There are three Saxonys. Yes indeed. Whereas France, they call it "Die große Nation," the great nation. You see? One might think totalitarianism would be on the French side. Let's play the music, Thomas. To hear it. Now, what you're telling us is that there is a paradoxically free conception of work. A non-authoritarian work. We mentioned Reinhard Höhn, we should also mention Wilhelm Stuckart and Werner Best, the two jurists who accompanied him.
1:03:33 And one of whom is indeed the father of the 1933 laws on the restoration of the German civil service, and of the Nuremberg laws. And the other, Werner Best, is one of the architects of the Gestapo. So, in short, convinced and important Nazis. And yet, they have a liberal approach to work. Yes, that's the second counter-intuitive episode. The first episode is that it's Nazi but management — because after all, at first glance you don't quite see the connection. And then you think that if the Nazis are interested in management, it must necessarily be vertical, authoritarian, and thoroughly oppressive.
1:04:06 Actually, not at all. Not at all, for a simple reason. The Nazis understood very well that in order to produce in quantities absolutely unprecedented in history, to produce so massively, you had to motivate what was called the "human material" — management. You needed free and undistorted competition. Not socialist emulation — that's some Jewish-Soviet bullshit. It's not me speaking that way. In the Third Reich, there's a constant parallel drawn between the Bolsheviks and Judeo-Bolsheviks. It's a slave mentality, an idea for slaves.
1:04:36 It's joy and enjoyment that must be... That reminds me a bit of the sixties too. As a thought, I have nothing against enjoyment. I'm talking about the discourse. There you go, I mean, at the forefront of management. You know, it's very fashionable. "We're a company, a start-up, you know, there's no boss here. We're all, we're friends, I mean. There's never been a question of salary between us."
1:05:07 That's the worst of it. That's the worst. I wrote an article about it, dare I say, in 20 Minutes, at the request of the editor-in-chief. But yes, I'm sorry. We do what we can. Especially since she told me our readership is 16-year-old girls. Let's go on. It's what today is called human resources. You had to motivate the factor of production that was the labor factor. You don't drive people with a whip. And that's why there was thinking about joy in the workplace.
1:05:38 You have a gigantic works council created in 1933 at the level of the whole Reich called the KDF, Strength through Joy, Kraft durch Freude. It's the leisure of workers, who also benefited from an advantageous social and fiscal policy, as did all Germans, as long as they weren't considered enemies of the regime — left-wingers — or not considered German. Stop, stop. We see the limits of Chapoutot here. He never mentions communists. Left-wingers, enemies of the regime, Jews are named, but never communists.
1:06:11 Right? Whereas the Nazis, when you look at all their... He knows this very well, even better than I do, he's even well documented. For them, they don't distinguish — Judeo-Bolsheviks. It's not Jews here, communists there. All of that is the same thing. And by the way, coming back, digging deeper here — the parenthesis — because we started from the reflection on freedom. And I go back to the Middle Ages. I told you last time that this is the period when the communes began to emancipate themselves from the feudal order.
Frei: the freedom of one who makes slaves 1:06:41 The emergence of the communes. And that's when you see Freiburgs appear. Literally, "free city." In France, "ville franche." And "villa franca." "Free town." All of that means the same thing. That's where you pay fewer taxes than the peasant on the land. It's like, to stay on that — in Sagrèbes. Here, there — you have an agreement with the lord. He takes some wheat from us now and then for his battles.
1:07:12 The result: he leaves us alone on taxes a bit more than... Now, this freedom he's going to talk about, this freedom which is a great value among the Nazis, is what he teaches us — it is the freedom of force. "Franks" means that. The most powerful of the Germanic tribes, from which our country takes its name — and the Franks, that wasn't a tribe on the banks of the Rhine, on France's borders, no. The Franks come from Franken, that's what it's called, the region of Nuremberg.
1:07:46 You can't get more central in Germany — at the junction of the two former Germanys. Thuringia, in particular, the region of Weimar, of Jena, of Nuremberg, which was already in the West, in Weimar, which was in the East, right? Weimar, cultural capital, with the statue of Goethe, and the Chinese, as a people, call it the green heart of Germany, over there. Deutschlands grünes Herz, the green heart of Germany. Now, that's why it's ridiculous to oppose ontologies like French and German, right?
1:08:19 This green heart of Germany is the origin of the Franks. There you go. Now, this freedom, all of it comes from "frei," which means free, but it's the freedom of the fox in the henhouse — it's the guy who is not a slave, that's the key if you want to understand the meaning. It's the one who, in battle, puts his sword to your throat. Either you die, or you serve me. You become my "Knecht," my servant.
1:08:51 "Herr und Knecht," which will inspire Hegel, the dialectic of master and slave, which will spawn offspring afterward, right? In revolutionary thought. So this is important, what we're looking at. Here, "free" doesn't at all mean the dialectic of freedom in Rousseau, and even less in Kant, right? It means the one who, through force, has escaped slavery — but who produces slaves. At the top of a social hierarchy that only works through serfdom or slavery.
1:09:25 There you go. That was important. It's this kind of freedom that's autonomous, liberal. Let's go, Thomas. We'll just finish this segment on the State and freedom. Even the Jews, for example. So there's some reflection on this. Moreover, the Nazis considered their State to be, I quote, a "National Socialist state under the rule of law." That is, it wasn't a dictatorship. Dictatorship, that was the Soviets.
1:09:56 Dictatorship, that's the Reds, that's the Asiatics, that's Stalin. That's the Orient, dictatorship. The Nazis remain faithful to that sort of somewhat ethno-nationalist topos which has run through Germany at least since Hegel, according to which Germany is the homeland of freedom. Freedom moved from East to West and it... Fine, we can stop there. There you go. You see, I need to warn you against ideology. It's not really my cup of tea as a philosopher. Right? There, though, it's not bad faith.
1:10:27 He doesn't know. Doesn't matter, in any case, but I mean, it's rather complex, but I mean he doesn't know that nothing is more opposed to Hegel than the law of blood, the law of... Right? Hegel's model when it comes to freedom is Rousseau, that is, the French Revolution. It's exactly the opposite, right? Everything that's vomited up by Nazi dignitaries — that is, based on recognition, precisely. And not... That's why I started there. I'll stop here, I'll hand it over to the room afterward. And not — that I started with Primo Levi, that gaze which recognizes nothing, which looks at you like a fish in a bowl.
Hegel, Schelling, and the march of freedom 1:11:04 The floor is yours. Because still, all of this is quite a set of revelations. Many thanks to Hakim for the computer that got us out of trouble. I thought that with the tablet we could amplify it, but that's not the case. Yes, Victor? I thank you for the point you made earlier about Hegel, about the spirit in Hegel indeed spreading from Asia toward Germany, which becomes the homeland of freedoms, etc. I just want to point out that there's a part of this chronology that Hegel takes uncritically from Schelling, notably the inversion of the place of Islam and Christianity.
1:11:45 That is to say, if you read Schelling closely — and Hegel takes this over uncritically — you first have the Roman Empire, stronger — and more slowly, Victor, because it's interesting. There's China, then it moves to India, then there's Egypt. It's actually reversed, because Egypt comes before China, but never mind that. Then it moves to Greece, then to Rome, and then it jumps straight to Germany with the divergences of Christianity. And there's an enormous gap — the entire passage through the Arab-Muslim world, the whole Middle Ages, is missing. And that's what Hegel takes from Schelling uncritically.
1:12:15 There will be something repressed. That's it. There are plenty of things in Hegel that come from Schelling's influence and that are not criticized, notably this element in fact. This is what makes Hegel invert the chronology between Islam and Christianity. Thank you, Victor. I remind those of you who know it less well than Victor that Schelling is the absolute reference point for the German Romantics in philosophy. And he deserves it, because he is a philosopher who is subtle, complex, and interesting.
1:12:45 But as Doctor Victor says, who is a thoroughgoing reactionary, to the point that the old king Frederick William IV—you must know this—as soon as Hegel died of cholera in Berlin in 1831, decided to recall old Schelling, who was already a bit senile, from Vienna in Austria among the Catholics, to come back to Berlin and exorcise Hegel's teaching. So there you go, I'm decoupling them—you coupled them, you're right, the young Hegel is marked. Schelling was a bit younger but he was more brilliant, so he was the one who had the greater influence when the three of them were together at the seminary.
1:13:19 But I always specify, when I refer to Hegel's famous quotation, that the Orient knew that only one is free. The Greeks knew that a few are free—the citizens as opposed to the slaves. The moderns know—meaning the Christians—that all are free. I remind you that the Orient here refers to historical metaphors, historical realities, not the geographical Orient. I even point out that there are people in Iraq who are much more modern than I am when it comes to nuclear technology; that doesn't mean the Orient is by essence archaic, but it is true that history began in the Orient. But where Victor is right is that the Orient is selective in Hegel.
1:14:04 The Chinese Orient is very developed—I'm not defending what you're saying—and the oriental Orient, apart from Jewish thought, where Hegel holds an extremely complex position that is anti-Judaic but not antisemitic. This has all been studied, especially if you look at his early texts—there's an admirable text called The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate, where Hegel still has the Greek model, he's still a bit pre-Nietzschean—yes, the Greeks represent beauty, and so on.
1:14:37 the Jews are at odds with everything that exists—Abraham grazed his flocks on a boundless land, this obsesses Hegel. But Hegel's whole evolution—and you know this at least as well as I do, I stress "at least" because your knowledge is fresher—Hegel's whole trajectory, and Hölderlin's too, will consist in realizing, belatedly, that Christianity and the Jewish world bring a depth that the Greeks did not have: the knowledge of evil and of the negative. I don't want to complicate things here, but this is to follow up on the excellent point made—but Hegel never wrote anything that could authorize the fusion of biologism and naturalism; there is no value more anti-Hegelian than naturalism. And the last point in response to your intervention: when Hegel says the Germanic world, for example in the Philosophy of Right, has the mission of realizing freedom as the final stage after the Orient—the Germanic world for him includes Spain.
1:15:47 France is not Germany, if you will, in the Philosophy of Right—and this corresponds to a historical reality, namely that the medieval world is a world largely dominated by Germanic tribes. I remind you that Andalusia comes from the Vandals—the name of the region Andalusia comes from the fact that it was occupied by these barbarians who were more often called Carls and Franz, isn't that right, than Bernardo and Emmanuel, who stayed—and as for the Visigoths, as I say, this makes my Arab friends jump when I say it, they were in the Maghreb before the Arab conquest. So it's Germanic in that sense—it's the world that gradually emerges from barbarism and the dark ages, as historians call them, when we don't know much that was written down in the Middle Ages, and which will soon take over from Antiquity. But it's not German in the racial sense—precisely not. It was important to clarify that. Yes, other interventions?
Producing more with fewer workers 1:16:57 on management this morning, don't you have any more questions? Yes, Emmanuel. Yes, Kraft durch Freude—strength through joy, sorry, joy—I was thinking, having thought of Monsters, Inc. as an illustration—I mixed that up, sorry—it made me think of Monsters, Inc., to say whether that's not—no, that's for that too, also for children. Yes, but for me it also made me think—I don't know how to put it—but it's necessarily about the destruction of the trade as such, which is evoked by Martin, and at the same time he specifies clearly that it's a period of enormous productivity on the part of the—and the other concept would be the negation of the negation, plus—but I have a hard time conceiving how we can say at the same time, together, both an increase in production and a decrease in
1:18:07 the quality of the representation of what people do—I didn't understand that. On the other hand, at the same time as we describe how people represent their work, how can we symmetrically have an increase in production? All right, now I'm starting to understand—Chapoutot is very precise about this: there is a purely economic logic at the outset, which has been little addressed before him—hence the originality of devoting a book to Nazi management—namely that the purely material problem facing the regime was how to produce more with fewer workers. That's becoming quite topical. Why fewer? Because they're all under arms, at the front, that's how it is. That's where it started, and that's where they drew on management theories coming from the United States, on the rationalization of production. That's my answer to the second part
1:19:17 of your question, that's it. Just as the fact that the war slowed down world trade forced them into a certain autarky, and thus to develop the chemical industry—you know, the Germans are still the greatest chemists even now; when you want to get rid of your cockroaches and insects in summer, you turn to Bayer, the same company that created Zyklon B gas, which worked wonders at Auschwitz—the very same company. So there, it was a material constraint at the outset, but with total cynicism: how to rationalize to the maximum, but with Pannwitz's gaze, as at the beginning of Primo Levi's book, without any regard for the humanity of those who are there. Well, we got interrupted there, but I'll refer you to that video—remember, Libres d'obéir, La Grande Table, France Culture, Johann Chapoutot—you'll see that at one point he cites the recent Orange verdict.
1:20:27 you know, the suicides at Orange, and Chapoutot says, listen, we laugh, but—there he's a bit naive, he says we must stop—and there he's right, I agree with what he says in the first part—when he concludes that it's strange, at the lexical level, we must stop talking about Nazism as monsters, as a phenomenon that appeared in history like some horrible flourish. I mean, no—it's us, it's our logic, it's yours, it's mine. What does "us" mean? As soon as you don't posit social classes, you're in ideological trickery. It's "us"—a bit like with the ecologists: if the planet is going down the drain, it's not because of the employers, it's because of you, Pauline, and me—we consume too much, we wallow in consumption, we need to change how we consume, otherwise there'll be nothing left of Australia, we've killed a billion animals, listen.
1:21:38 they must have counted the insects too. I mean, I'm partly answering your question—don't hesitate, because this is huge, I'm worried, I don't know if we can still rein in the machine, because it's been on the rails for a while now. I mean, if it's former SS men who founded the ABCs of business schools that run the world, we're so proud—where there's a standard of living, freedoms that don't exist elsewhere, can you imagine—because he says it, the Germans were rewarded, they were grateful, this government at the time—as long as you were neither Jewish nor an enemy of the regime, neither Jewish nor communist nor a left-wing Christian—because I say this to be honest, I don't know if some of you have heard of the White Rose network, a network of Christians, but of such naivety—the poor things, they were angels—with a Catholic priest in southern Germany who had said, but this isn't what the Gospel teaches, you see.
1:22:48 who rebelled against the anti-Jewish measures as early as the 1930s, and they were so naive, with no political experience, distributing leaflets on trains packed with Gestapo agents, etc.—they were hanged on butcher's hooks, they were 18 years old, it's appalling, you see. So all that, once it's been eliminated and all of Europe is placed under strict control, the labor force—he puts it very well, Chapoutot, earlier—it's like an employment agency offering to Bayer, to Volkswagen, you see, to all of it, of course to the Ruhr steelworks, all the labor force they need, as he says, at unbeatable prices. Question on an approach, from the labor force point of view, on an approach—
